X@COM - "Fantasy X-Com"

X@COM is a "fantasy X-Com roguelike", which is a curious idea to my mind but well worth a look:

Ever wanted to play a deep tactical fantasy game based on the great X-COM mechanics? Answer: Yes.

"A Rookie's Tale" is exactly that and much, much more.

Our protagonist, Victor Wade, alien-fighting soldier turned interdimensional traveler, suddenly finds himself in a world guided by magic rather than science. How he got here we've already seen, how he gets back is another story.

Not every story will be the same, though. To call this mod a single mission would be an understatement. Perhaps "epic single mission" or "game-in-a-mission" might be more appropriate. Making full use of the engine's greatly expanded and improved mod support, Rookie's Tale is a highly dynamic experience that shows much more of what the engine can really do—the R7 scenario Cataclysm was an interesting experimental introduction to the new dynamic content system, but barely touched the surface compared to the variety you'll see in this mod.

Victor is not alone, at least not for long. As he explores the world he can recruit party members from the local population (you control them this time around) and take them along on the search for a way home. There are seven standard character classes, each with class-based special abilities, and a host of other unique characters that may come to Victor's aid. On your travels, you'll talk to NPCs, recover artifacts, topple paranoid warlords, stop rampaging ogres, repel goblin invasions, uncover demon-worshipping cults, delve into ancient ruins, open interplanar gates, pilot gnomish inventions, loot treasure troves, face (or run in fear from) liches, demons, and dragons, and a whole lot more. Okay, maybe not all at once, but you'll definitely use magic from among 50+ arcane spells and holy incantations (mostly of the fun and interesting kind, not a bunch of cookie cutter direct damage stuff), along with 25+ special abilities. Under the right circumstances, your allies will even raise levels to gain better stats and more abilities. And be on the lookout for others, friendly or not, who may have made the dimensional jump as well…

The fantasy setting is obviously not original. It's D&D meets X-COM meets my imagination (that last one can be considered the glue—or crazy glue depending on your perspective). This is both intentional and necessary at this point because X@COM is still lacking UI support for providing detailed info about objects/units, so I'm trying to rely on your existing knowledge to help you get into the game, and [maybe] survive. Don't worry, there is plenty of unexpected content of my own design to catch you off guard, but having your traditional RPG hat on while you play won't hurt.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
Talk about misleading. I read XCOM fantasy and thought hell yes. Then clicked the link and actually saw what the game looked like.

Looks like a BBS door game from the 1980s. Literally. I spent a lot of hours playing those, and my number one thought back then was "this is fun but why the hell can't anyone figure out how to install a graphics engine on the client side and get rid of these stupid ASCII graphics?"

Originally Posted by fadedc
From what I understand, it's pretty easy to create tile sets for these games to make them much easier to look at. However, some roguelike purists really prefer the old school ASCII tilesets.

Originally Posted by fadedc
From what I understand, it's pretty easy to create tile sets for these games to make them much easier to look at. However, some roguelike purists really prefer the old school ASCII tilesets.

Roguelike purists is about 5 people, worldwide, right?

Anyway, ASCII graphics were done by using the ASCII character set to simulate graphics. ASCII games ran in text mode, so they could not use tilesets. Games that ran in graphics mode and used sprite animations from that era looked something like this:

I should hope not as it is just a play on the original name and a good faith effort to make use of the sorely underused classic mechanics. Perhaps the mod could change the title to the "A Rookie's Tale" to prevent some further confusion and maybe let folks reckon it for what it aims to do?

The full entry and the top of the page gets into lots more detail folks, as does the past news entries, newsbits for other modules, etc. This framework is super-promising for all sorts of other games and whatnot to come if the current dev pace holds—-just about the only other RL project that even touches the sort of complex FOV this handles is Mujahid, and another reason why graphics would be a good bit of work(though if you check the project roadmap—-you will see that is in the mix alongside a heap else.)

2013 is going to be full of all sorts of player content creation friendly RPG'ish capable projects folks—-this one being a nice, free darkhorse in the race.

Yep, TOME is a great game, I pretty much consider it to be the standard to which all other roguelikes must be compared (that and Crawl). I'm pretty burnt out on it now, but I still go back and check it out again every few patches.